Recently I have noticed a marked drop in transfer on our programs. I often "bank" a few minutes before I start to play the show and was able to watch the entire show without any pauses due to transfer. Now I get it frequently.

Recently I have noticed a marked drop in transfer on our programs. I often "bank" a few minutes before I start to play the show and was able to watch the entire show without any pauses due to transfer. Now I get it frequently.

is this with streaming (Photos, music, showcases) or pytivo (now playing...)?

Is your network wired or wireless?

Any other computers on the network that might be doing stuff on the network? (downloading a torrent for example?)

Is your desktop computer busy doing other things? Especially since it's a G5, you probably want to keep the computer unbusy if you're transcoding.

(leading to Is the source streamed as-is or is transcoding necessary (i.e. what format did you use when downloading with iTiVo?)

It's hard to guess with so little information, but my instinct is that you're either transferring more data per minute of show (higher bandwidth/quality recording) or your network is 'congested' -- made more likely if it's wireless and the router got moved, or the transmitter is closer to the wall...

But with more info we can probably narrow it down and possibly fix it...

To answer your question, I have not noticed any such problems on my home network.

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is this with streaming (Photos, music, showcases) or pytivo (now playing...)?

Is your network wired or wireless? Wired

Any other computers on the network that might be doing stuff on the network? (downloading a torrent for example?) THe network is pretty light. I obviously do not attempt to pull a show from the TiVo while downloading another to the Now Playing

Is your desktop computer busy doing other things? Especially since it's a G5, you probably want to keep the computer unbusy if you're transcoding. ..again- keeping it light while transcoding

(leading to Is the source streamed as-is or is transcoding necessary (i.e. what format did you use when downloading with iTiVo?)I guess this is the interesting part to some degree, although some further tinkering is required. If I have a DVD that I ripped, and encoded using Visual Hub (using the TiVo preset), things seem to transfer fine. I think the issue has been more with the content I've pulled from the TiVo using itivo. My original setup was using "decrypt." I've started to venture out to try some of the other settings but the encoding times are a joke....

It's hard to guess with so little information, but my instinct is that you're either transferring more data per minute of show (higher bandwidth/quality recording) or your network is 'congested' -- made more likely if it's wireless and the router got moved, or the transmitter is closer to the wall...I guess it is likely the attempt to push too much data at the Tivo that makes the most sense to me as I think this has been since I started using itivo. I suppose I could go back and re-encoding things again through VH, but isn't that why I'm using pyTivoX? Argh.

If anyone has a favorite itivo setting to suggest, I'd give it a whirl- as always, I appreciate everyone's comments and help.

But with more info we can probably narrow it down and possibly fix it...

To answer your question, I have not noticed any such problems on my home network.

For some reason the first question wasn't answred (pytivo or streambaby). I'm going to assume pytivo for this answer, but either program would have the same issues:

If you notice it with iTivo in 'decrypt' and not with encoding you made with visualhub, then I would guess that the decrypt (i.e. the native format from the tivo) is failing the 'can it be streamed' test in pytivo/streambaby, and therefore it is actually re-encoding the file as it sends the file. This would cause a slowdown as the computer has to work to convert instead of just send files as-is (and on a G5 that would definitely tax the computer).

You can check if that's happening by looking at the logs for either pytivo (/tmp/pyTivoX.log) or streambaby (/tmp/pyTivoX-SB.log). There would be invocation of ffmpeg in there for transcoding.

If that's the case, I'm guessing that's a bug since I'm pretty sure you can stream original tivo data without converting it. We can work to fix it (but lets see if that's indeed the case).

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HI, thanks for the great program, I have been using it frequently. I have an iMac which has the software on it, and a tivo series 3. Pytivo works just fine (transferring the show), but I can't get streambaby to work, if I click on it using my tivo, nothing happens, just a please wait ..

I can't get streambaby to work, if I click on it using my tivo, nothing happens, just a please wait ..

which lasts for several minutes

I'm a little unclear on the meaning of 'click on it'..
Do you go to My Photos, Music, Showcases?
Does the pyTivoX streambaby thing show up? Do you click on that? is that when the 'please wait..' happens? Or do you select a show and *then* the please wait happens?

Also, are you using the beta of pyTivoX, or release 1.1?

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I'm a little unclear on the meaning of 'click on it'..
Do you go to My Photos, Music, Showcases?
Does the pyTivoX streambaby thing show up? Do you click on that? is that when the 'please wait..' happens? Or do you select a show and *then* the please wait happens?

Also, are you using the beta of pyTivoX, or release 1.1?

Yeah I go through Photos/Music/Showcases, see the imac.local and select that with my remote on the tivo. Then it says please wait, and nothing ever happens. I am using version 1.2b10, should I go back a version or two?

...You can check if that's happening by looking at the logs for either pytivo (/tmp/pyTivoX.log) or streambaby (/tmp/pyTivoX-SB.log). There would be invocation of ffmpeg in there for transcoding.

I apologize for not clarifying that the issue was pytivo related and not SB. I pulled the log file for an episode of "Lost" that I attempted to load. You'd know better than I if it is envoking FFmpeg in there... I believe that it is? Here is the beginning of the log.

Yeah I go through Photos/Music/Showcases, see the imac.local and select that with my remote on the tivo. Then it says please wait, and nothing ever happens. I am using version 1.2b10, should I go back a version or two?

Thanks
Mo

Nah, if you're sticking with the beta (1.2 is the beta branch right now) then you may as well use the latest.

Ok so for some reason it is failing to generate the list of what movies are available. I'm assuming something goes wrong, and hopefully it prints out some useful info in the log... Can you open up Terminal.app and run

Code:

tail -50 /tmp/pyTivoX-SB.log

or if you're using the LATEST beta (as of today), run

Code:

tail -50 ~/Library/Logs/pyTivoX/streambaby.log

Anything interesting in there?

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It is transcoding, though I'm not sure why. Turn on debug to see the reason.

(to turn on debug, you'll need to edit the file

Code:

<user>/Library/Application Support/pyTivoX/pyTivo.conf

and in a new line right after Port=9032, add

debug=True

Then exit pyTivoX, and start it again.

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Have modified conf file to include debug statement and restarted. I am assuming that I would need to draw a movie over and review the log file to see this debug information?

Presumably.. Debug lines in the log will start with the word "DEBUG", you're probably looking for some invocation of 'ffmpeg' and information around it as to why it's choosing to transcode.

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Looks like the original video is set to 60fps, your tivo series 649 (a S2 directivo) is unable to play that.

So, either pytivo is misprobing your tivo and assuming it can't play it, or it's probing correctly, in which case the transcoding makes sense.... ?

Since it's Lost, which comes off

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Yoav,
The Tivo is a Serie 2 Standalone unit - no Direct TV.
I follow you that the the frame rate is off and thereby causing it to kickstart the transcoding. I am just not sure why or if this is resolvable.

I'm using iTivo in decrypt to pull the content off the tivo and pytivox to feed it back- so I'm not clear on why the frame rates are so out of whack....

oops yeah
I was gonna say that ABC broadcasts in 720p, which is supposedly 60fps. But if you pull it off the tivo and it's a series 2, then it's not an HD recording and therefore that's not the reason.

Ok, so fwiw, I just tried pulling an SD show off my Series 3, and it is also exhibiting this 'issue'. Notably, the container frame rate is 60 fps, while the actual frame rate of the video is 30 fps. I'm wondering if that's a bad 'ffmpeg', a bad 'tivodecode', or if tivos just do that... and if so, should pyTivo ignore the container and trust the video stream?

Note the source is actually at 30 fps (29.97 tbr,..., 59.94 tbc).. I'm not a codec weenie though, so the question is how pytivo determines if it's 60 or 30 fps.

wmcbrine?

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since there's both a tbr (correct) and tbc (incorrect) value on that line, the regexp swallows as
much as it can into the first .+, and then pulls the tbc value into x.group(1). After this
there is some code to correct for some versions of ffmpeg and a videoredo issue, but nothing
that would fix this.

So some code needs to be added to pytivo to address this behavior of the new ffmpeg....
I'm not sure why it's fps:tb.. but presumably if there's a tbc and tbr value, it should use
the tbr value... Or there may be a more 'correct fix'. Either way Tad you're gonna
have to deal with the transcoding for a little while longer

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Yoav,
I'm glad to have stumbled on to this- knowing the power of pytivox- I would hate for someone new to it to try it and think that the transfer rate is slow. I am constantly amazed at the brain-trust here and am sure that a fix will present itself.

I missed this because I was mostly testing with an S3, which accepts the 59.94 rate without transcoding.

I have a tentative workaround... only, I like to know what the frak I'm doing, and I can't find actual documentation of "tbr" etc. anywhere. What does it even stand for? Maybe I'll have to consult the ffmpeg source code to figure it out.

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I missed this because I was mostly testing with an S3, which accepts the 59.94 rate without transcoding.

I have a tentative workaround... only, I like to know what the frak I'm doing, and I can't find actual documentation of "tbr" etc. anywhere. What does it even stand for? Maybe I'll have to consult the ffmpeg source code to figure it out.

Well, I'm not much help here either, but from the ffmpeg source, this seems like the relevant code (libavformat/utils.c):

Seems like tbr, tbc and tbn are all computed for video streams, each with a different meaning. Running back through the code it seems that the tbr is 'corrected' based on values later printed out as tbn and tbc (whereas tbn and tbc are associated with the length of a frame according to the codec). So I'm guessing tbr is the 'normal' meaning of frame rate, and the other two are codec/container related values... Just for kicks I looked at what ffmpeg prints out for an mp4 rip I made with handbrake... :

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Yeah... sort of. I grepped the ffmpeg source myself and found a little more info, but it's still vague.

Anyway, I've committed my workaround to the repo. It fixes several of my test videos. However, I still have one video (that came from a Series 2 TiVo!) which comes up as 29.97 with an older version of ffmpeg, and 59.94 with 0.5 -- and it doesn't show 29.97 anywhere. I'm wondering now if I should just pass through 59.94 as valid for the Series 2. It's a kludge, but I don't see it going wrong too often -- the only real use of 59.94 is in 720p video, AFAIK, and that would still be flagged to reencode due to the resolution.

Edit: I went ahead and did that, too. Fingers crossed.

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It's a kludge, but I don't see it going wrong too often -- the only real use of 59.94 is in 720p video, AFAIK, and that would still be flagged to reencode due to the resolution.

Updating pyTivoX beta to include your new code changes.. I suppose at worst if 'the kludge' doesn't work, we'll hear about it...

Tad is it working now?

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So at least for this video, it looks like it's now doing the right thing...

Cool, and you can thank wmcbrine for fixing it this quickly...

-- yoav

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